A.L.I.

This is a problem that I find absolutely fascinating : How can one lose one’s identity ? Such cases, although rare, are nevertheless encountered clinically and are called « identity amnesia ». You know what the picture is like. Someone declares to no longer know one’s name. The subject does not know where he comes from, nor where he belongs, in other words, he has simply lost contact with his whole context ; however, if he has learnt how to mend a television set, he can still do it, or if he has learnt a foreign language, he still knows it ; all knowledge is still available to him.

I have often tried to understand what a mother tongue was ; we are indeed frequently able to talk various foreign tongues, sometimes with even greater fluency than our own.

The borromean knot is the solution to the following problem : How could we make hold together circles that don’t make couple? We’ll show, I hope at least, why this knot should concern psychoanalysts.

I wish to begin with a paradox which some readers may not appreciate, which may wound our narcissism as Lacanians: against all odds, we have fallen behind in elaborating a clinical approach to narcissism. I say “against all odds” because Lacan does deeply develop questions around the notions of the mirror, the specular, the self and paranoia. Regarding psychoses, the work in our field and within our organization is not lacking and builds upon the leads left open by Lacan about, for example, relationships between image and object. But perhaps we have neglected the position of narcissism in ordinary clinical practice, despite the fact that it is precisely the field most subjected to current social changes.  

The Freudian revolution was inaugurated by the unprecedented discovery of the Symptom of the hysteric with wars telling the truth of the patient that seeks to be heard rather than observed. The symptom has a definite advantage in not being examined like some strange object that causes suffering, « bilderschrift » according to Freud. In English he would doubtless have used the word « hieroglyph » or perhaps more literally, « image-writing ».1

Since we are among analysts of different theoretical conceptions, it seemed necessary to me, in order to introduce the instruments and the ideas of our own, concerning psychosomatics (and which come from Lacan’s indications and their development by Charles Melman), to start by the clinics and situate them in parallel with those of a non-Lacanian author. That’s why I retained a recent article in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (HP 1988,69: 43-53) of a canadian author called Paul Lefebvre, entitled : « The psychoanalysis of a patient with ulcerative colitis. The impact of fantasy, affect and the intensity of drives on the outcome of treatment ». I shall rapidly summarize it, after which I shall bring in a few elements of a personal case in order to try to situate our convergences and our divergences.

1 - FREUD DID NOT LEAD US THAT WAY.

Though he himself did not speak about psychosomatics, he isolated the field of actual neurosis, the symptomatology of which was not to be interpreted since it is not the equivalent of a ciphered writing of the repressed unconscious wish.

Freud was inclined to see in them the result of a present defect of sexual satisfaction. This conception, because it emphasizes the economic standpoint, is self-evident, and is still to be found in current theorizations.

Psycho-analysts sometimes set out to write. Works of fiction generally, close to autobiography in the special, often sacralized form that reflects their own psycho-analysis. As for writers, they are growlingly aware of psycho-analysis either through a direct personal experience of it or through the general effect it has on the period.

In most cases, the outcome is a massive and complacent description of fantasies with quite explicit patterns of enjoyment recurring as an accumulation of flashbacks without the least trace of repression : The resulting exaltation of anguish is supposed to be a guarantee of the psycho-analytic quality of the writing, and the handling of signifiers a proof of authenticity, even though it hardly differs from the kind of punning used in commercials.

Other texts exemplify a perfect absence of subjectivity with an articulation of language following the most compelling and unlikely necessities of concatenation as in the process of free association. But again, dare one take this as a guarantee of a rigorous attitude vis à vis the unconscious when dealing with the writing of such literary work as a short story ?

If I have chosen to talk about Francis Ponge, the French writer and poet who was born in 1899 and who died in 1988, it is because this work, in which each word is weighed up and which continues to have great bearing for our time, aims, both for himself and for the reader at being an object of « pleasure » (it is his word) and a lesson. Because also, it is a work which he addresses explicitly to the reader hoping that the latter will make of his reading « an act » ... « as he says », a revolutionary act in the sense of universal gravity an act which holds the risk of being revolutionized oneself.

Psychoanalysis, if it has any expected therapeutic effects, is in no way the same “thing” as psychotherapy.